The
Memorial Human Rights Centre continues
its work in the North Caucasus. We offer you here the new issue of
our regular bulletin containing a brief description of the key events
featured in our news section over the three months of 2008 and a few
examples of our analysis of the trends in development of the
situation in the region. This bulletin contains materials collected
by the Memorial Human Rights Centre working in the North Caucasus and
published on the Memorial website as well as media and information
agencies reports.

Summer Escalation of
Violence

Thefull-scalewarbetweenRussiaandGeorgiathatbrokeoutonAugust
7 had completely obscured all news
and issues relating to the Caucasus region. Not wishing to elaborate
here on the reasons and developments of the new drama that broke out
in the Caucasus, we nevertheless believe it important to stress that
the armed conflict on the other side of the Caucasus Ridge, in the
North Caucasus, far from coming to an end, showed a sharp escalation
of tensions over the summer months of 2008.

Thekeycriteriaaccordingtowhichweevaluatetheintensityof
warfare is the number of casualties sustained by the security forces
of the Russian Federation in armed encounters and clashed as well as
resulting from terrorist attacks. The table below has been compiled
on the basis of the data collected by the VoineNet
website (http://www.voinenet.ru),
which has been accumulating and analyzing information from across the
Russian media on casualties sustained by the forces of the Russian
Federation in summer 2008.1:

June

July

August

TOTAL

Killed

Wounded

Killed

Wounded

Killed

Wounded

Killed

Wounded

Chechnya`

11

32

10

16

12

22

33

70

Ingushetia

3

10

14

39

12

26

29

75

Dagestan

3

1

2

7

6

5

11

13

Kabardino-Balkaria

5

5

3

4

3

9

11

TOTAL

17

48

31

65

34

56

82

169

According to our
calculations made on the basis of the data obtained from the same
source, in summer 2007
the casualty figures for the Russian military and police forces
serving in the conflict zone stood at 61
persons killed and
132 wounded, while the figures for thesummer 2006were 83
killed and 210 wounded. Thus, the
fatality figures have sadly reached the level of two years ago –
the period of increased activity of Basayev and Maskhadov. What
should be particularly emphasized is the fact that the casualties in
the tiny Ingushetia have for the first time surpassed the figures for
Chechnya – 104 and 103 persons
respectively.

We would also consider
it important to emphasize the fact that the military and law
enforcement casualty figures in Chechnya were not lower than over the
same period in 2007
(28 killed and 80 wounded).
On the contrary, the militant underground has become even more active
in Kabardino-Balkaria.

Members of the Anti-War
Club ‘VoineNet’ have recently presented the results of
their own analysis of the casualty statistic for the
summer months of 2004 – 2008.
For the first time over the last 5 years, an upward trend has clearly
manifested itself in the casualty statistic for the military and law
enforcement officers over the so-called resulting from their clashes
with the guerilla forces (www.voinenet.ru/index.php?aid=17124)

With regard to the Chechen
Republic, the worst situation has been
observed in the mountainous Vedeno and
Nozhai-Yurt districts, where attacks on
convoys and posts of the security services continued. Moreover, three
cases of siege of populated settlements by militants had been
registered throughout summer 2008.

On the night of June
13 a big group of Chechen militants
(numbering about 60 persons) under the command of the warlord Usman
Muntsygoventered
the village of Benoi-Vedeno in
the Nozhai-Yurt district, which
remained under his total control for a few hours.
The militants’ raid resulted in
the killing of 3 persons, destruction of several (according to
different sources, the number ranged from 3 to 5) households and 2
motorcars which belonged to the local residents – all of them
were families of the local law enforcement officers. The local
residents allege that the police and the military only came to the
village in the morning, several hours after the militants left the
village of Benoi-Vedeno completely unhampered
(http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/06/m135931.htm;
Information Agency Kavkazsky uzel,
4.7.2008).

Following the attack on
Benoi-Vedeno, on June 18,
the President of Chechnya Ramzan
Kadyrov held a meeting
with the heads of the republican and the federal security services in
Chechnya, where he fiercely criticized their work. He also demanded
that they immediately hold a large-scale operation against the
militant groups, saying, however, as usual, that the latter now
numbered only 5 or 6 remaining persons. Nervetheless, Kadyrov thought
it fit to involve not only the units of the Ministry of Defence
troops, the special task ‘Sever’ and ‘Yug’
battalions of the Interior Troops of the Russian Ministry of
Interior, but also the 2nd
regiment of the police patrol guard service (the special task
regiment of the Chechen Ministry of Interior named after the late
Akhmat Kadyrov) (website ’Ramzan
Akhmatovich Kadyrov’,, 18.6.2008).
The Chechen Minister of Interior R.Alkhanov
has recently confirmed the drastic rise in the militants’
activity alleging that the latter had recently a new portion of
financing from their Arabic sponsors (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 20.6.2008).

During the second half
of June the troops mentioned by the President of Chechnya were
introduced into the Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt districts. The fragmentary
information that had leaked into the media showed that the operation
was a mixed success. The militants, ever faithful to their guerilla
tactic, refrained from entering open confrontations opting widely for
ambush tactic instead. Thus, in the evening of June
27 several Chechen police officers
fell into an ambush on the road entering the village of Dargo of the
Vedeno district, which resulted in four of them being killed and four
others wounded. However, according to the information which Kavkazsky
Uzel was able to obtain from the eye-witnesses among the local
residents, the fire exchange was very intensive and it is quite
possible that the number of victims among Chechen police officers
could in reality be far greater (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 28.6.2008).

On the night to June 29
a group of militants numbering up to 70 entered the village of
Elistanzhi in Vedeno district of the Chechen Republic. They opened
fire at the deployment location of a squadron of the ‘Yug’
battalion as well as at the base of the village police department,
which normally consists of police officers on detached service from
other regions of the Russian Federation. The militants killed a local
resident who was the head of administration of the Vedeno district.
He was taken by force out of his house and shot dead outside. Also,
gunfire was opened at a passing car carrying officers of the ‘Yug’
battalion who were driving from the village of Agishbatoy to the
village of Elistanzhi. The attack resulted in one battalion officer
being killed. In the morning the militants left the village
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/rubr/28/index.htm).

The third case of
seizure of a village by armed militants took place in August in the
Urus-Martan district. Here an
attack on the village of Goy-Chu
(Komsomolskoye) of the Urus-Martan district
took place on August 15.
The fire attack on the local police department resulted in 3 police
officers being gravely wounded. The militants left the village in
cars which they took from the locals – this fact provided the
police with sufficient ground to subsequently accuse them of
collaboration with the terrorists
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m144665.htm).

The militant forces
continue to escalate their activity in the Republic
of Ingushetia. Last summer had hardly
seen a day without coming news of attacks, fire exchange, blasts. The
republic for the first time topped the list of the North Caucasus
regions with regard to the number of casualties among security
services officers. This is a fairly expected result of the way the
events have been developing in the republic over the past years,
where law enforcement and security officers have been perpetually and
flagrantly violating the rights of the local residents in the course
of the anti-terrorist operations. In actual practice, the security
services are playing into the hands of the militants by contributing
to further expansion of their mobilisable resources and shattering
people’s confidence in the authorities.

A new, previously
unknown concept of “civil war” is now increasingly
becoming a reality in the republic. One of the leaders of the
Ingushetia opposition Magomed Khazbiev told the TV project Grani.Ru
in his very frank interview that… “…under cover
of darkness ordinary guys from our streets just go out and avenge
their brothers by killing all and any officers of law enforcement
services, which they happen to come across” (Grani.Ru
TV project, 4.9.2008).

However,
it is far from being a hard and fast rule that the militants
exclusively choose officers of security services as their targets;
civil servants and people, who have no connection to the authorities
whatsoever, also infrequently become victims of their attacks.
Militants, who are followers of radical Islam, commit attacks on
representatives of the official Muslim clergy, who, in their opinion,
are mercenary accomplices of the authorities and security services.
For
example, on August
2 the house belonging to the
family of the imam of the Altiyevsky
municipal district mosque in Nazran
came under gunfire. The imam and his son were taken to hospital as a
result of the attack. On August 21 a bomb exploded near the house of
the imam of the mosque in the village of Maysky. In this case no harm
was done. (IA Kavkazsky uzel,
21.8.2008).

The
summary chronicles of the events over a
span of a few days given below clearly shows the intensity and the
density of militants’ attacks in Ingushetia.

On
July 2, at about 15.30, in the
city of Malgobek on Promyshlennaya street,
unidentified persons driving a silver-coloured VAZ-21110 vehicle
without a licence plate, opened fire from automatic firearms at a
VAZ-21310 vehicle carrying 5 officers of the temporary task group of
the Ministry of Interior who were sent to serve on a mission from the
Kurgan region Department of Interior. All the police officers inside
received gunshot wounds and two of them – operative officer
Alexander Malafeev,
born in 1985, and Maksim Makarenko,
born in 1982, died of their wounds.

10 minutes later, at the
intersection of Fizkulturnaya and
Oskanova streets unidentified persons
driving allegedly the same car opened fire at a VAZ-2107 patrol car
of the Traffic Police Department of the Malgobek district Department
of Interior, which was carrying officers of the Malgobek district
Department of Interior and of the City Defence Forces of the Malgobek
district department of the Russian Ministry of Interior. The attack
resulted in inspector of the Road Patrol Service of the Traffic
Police Department Magomed Korigov,
born in 1983, and officer of the City Defence Forces Denis
Orlov, born in 1980,receiving gunshot
wounds (www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m139527.htm)

In
the afternoon of July 5
unidentified persons in Ingushetia оpened
fire at the vehicle convoy carrying servicement
on the road leading out of the village of Sredniye
Achaluki of the Malgobek district. The
fire was opened from a black VAZ-21110 vehicle. The attack resulted
in one person being killed and two being wounded
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m139517.htm).
An hour earlier on the Malgobek-Sagopshi
motorway unidentified persons opened
fire at officers of a mobile post of traffic police. One officer was
wounded. On the same day a six-hour battle broke out in the Malgobek
district, at the sheep-yard of the
Fargiev family between the villages of Sagopshi and Sredniye
Achaluki. In the course of this
operation officers of the Russian Ministry of Interior and FSB
Department killed four militants. Two servicemen were also killed,
two others were wounded. On the same day, on Mulatieva street in
Nazran a mobile police post came under gunfire opened by unidentified
persons. One police officer was wounded as a result. (Kavkazsky
uzel, 5.7.2008).

On
the next day, July 6, the search
for the militant attackers with whom the security services were
fighting the day before resumed. A body of a militant and a wounded
armed man were discovered at an abandoned farm in the vicinity of the
village of Sagopshi,
the wounded man started shooting back upon being discovered and was
shot dead (Kavkazsky uzel, 7.7.2008).
On the same day the head of the republican Department for Combating
Organised Crime of Ministry of Interior, Magomed Bapkoyev, was gunned
down while driving his car.

On
the night from July 8 to July 9, the
armed militants attacked the village of Muzhichi
in the Sunzhensky district. For a while
the village was completely under the militants’ control, they
were driving from one side of the village to another in cars which
they had seized from the villagers and they were behaving in a loud
and blatantly aggressive manner not only with representatives of the
authorities but also with the local people. The militants shot
ex-police officers Kh.Torshkhoyev
and R.Daliev
dead, having accused of being informers and wounded a police officer
I.Aushev. In response to loud and open expression of indignation at
their actions on the part of 70-year-old Ibragim
Chapanov, the old man was simply shot
dead by them thus becoming the third victim of the village siege on
that day (www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m138197.htm).

The number of militants
seizing the village of Muzhichi given by various military services
varied between 12 and 15. The militants’ own websites spoke of
a 100-men strong group. According to the local people, including the
local staff of the Memorial, their number was approximately 15 –
20 people.

On
the same night an attack was
committed on the operational post of a regiment of the Ministry of
Interior internal troops not far from stanitsa
Nesterovskaya.

One has to acknowledge
the ability of the militant groups to conduct several operations
simultaneously and with apparent efficiency. It was no coincidence
that after the attack on Muzhichi the following announcement was
made: “forces of the Ingushetia
Ministry of Interior have been put on alert… the “Fortress”
plan regime has been introduced:the
security of facilities belonging to the Ministry of Interior as well
as of governmental and administrative facilities, high-threat
facilities and community facilities has been stepped up”
(IA Kavkazsky uzel, 9.7.2008).
Thus, we can speak of the Ingushetia security services adopting the
defensive tactic. Yet, the bosses of the Ministry of Interior, who
arrived to Muzhichi a few days later, were unable to come up with
something better than recommend the local people to create militia
units for defending themselves.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m143677.htm).
Thus, the republican authorities themselves practically undertake
steps typical of a civil war situation.

At the end of the summer
armed attacks on ethnic Russian civilians in Ingushetia resumed. On
August 26, in the village of Troitskaya
in the Sunzhensky district a garbage
truck came under gunfire, as a result the driver and a woman sitting
next to him were wounded. Both were ethnic Russians and employees of
the Sunzhensky Production Office of the Housing Maintenance and
Utilities Sector Yuri Ilyichenko, born in 1956, and 54-year-old
Polyakova. (Kavkazsky uzel, 26.8.2008)
On the night of August 27, a Russian family – father and
daughter, 52-year-old Vassily Artemyev and 21-year-old Oxana –
were shot dead in stanitsa Ordzhonikidzevskaya again in the
Sunzhensky district. Their bodies were discovered by a neighbour. (IA
Rosbalt-Yug, 27.8.2008).

In general, according to
the website Ingushetiya.Ru,
Ingush police officers try to avoid open confrontations with the
militants, they are demoralized, many want to quit their job at the
police to avoid being targeted by militants or participating in
unlawful suppression of their own fellow countrymen. The Minister of
Interior frequently has to resort to promises of material benefits
and threats in order to make them continue their work
(Ingushetiya.Ru,5,6../2008 etc).
According to staff of the Memorial office in Nazran, instances of
police officers leaving their work for fear of becoming a possible
target for the militants do take place, yet far from being as
widespread as Ingushetiya.Ru claims them to be. The total number of
such cases may reach several dozens but definitely not hundreds of
former police officers. Quite naturally, the information concerning
the numbers of officers who quit their job is not disclosed by the
republican Ministry of Interior, therefore, the scale of this trend
can only be roughly estimated.

The situation in the Republic of Dagestan in
summer 2008 was not much different from
that in the neighbouring Chechnya and Ingushetia. On June 30 the
Dagestan Minister of Interior A.
Magomedtagirov recognized that the
situation in the Republic of Dagestan had drastically deteriorated
lately. According to him, there has been an escalation in the
activity of militants of the underground bandit groups. Police car
blasts, new attempts on lives of law enforcement officers, constant
new discoveries of arms and ammunition caches clearly testify of the
intention of the militants to unhinge the situation in the region
(RIA Dagestan, 30.6.2008).

According to the authorities, the
epicenter of the terrorist activity is now found in the south of the
republic – in Derbent and the Derbent district, the
Tabasaransky and Suleyman-Stalsky districts. According to the data
announced at the meeting of the anti-terrorist commission, “….today
150 followers of the Wahhabi teaching are on the police record in the
mountainous regions of the Southern province. Yet, assessing the
scale of terrorist activity, one can assume with a great degree of
certainty that their real quantity is far greater...” According
to A.Magomedtagirov, since the beginning of the year, 15 militants
were killed and 8 terrorists and their accomplices were arrested in
the Derbent area while offering armed resistance. The security
services had also discovered 3 bunkers, 2 caches of weapons, 12
machine guns, 2 pistols, 5 improvised explosive devices and a large
amount of ammunition had been seized. (IAKavkazskyuzel,
24.7.2008).

The situation remained
tense in the Khasavyurt district
where bomb explosions as well as attacks on police officers continued
to be a regular phenomenon. On June 7
– 8 a large-scale special
operation was conducted in the town of
Khasavyurt. In the course of that
operation the town was blocked which was followed by selective search
and an indiscriminate round of visits to private households. The
security services had seized a significant quantity of weapons and
ammunition: four AT-26 grenade launchers, nine cartridges for AT-7,
11 firearms, among which were machine guns, pistols and carbines, 22
grenades, 5 kilogrammes of TNT, bullet-proof vests, battle uniforms,
three portable Kenwood radio sets, telescopic sights and 15 silent
weapon devices, two clandestine mini-factories specializing in
conversion of air weapons into combat weapons, were liquidated, with
confiscation of components for 120 items of fire weapons (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 8.7.2008).

The operation also brought 11 arrests on suspicion
of links to the illegal armed groups. The remarkable fact about the
search was that it was conducted not only in flats of ordinary people
but also in the houses of municipal civil servants and of the bosses
of certain security services: the superintendent of the Khasavyurt
criminal police service Raip Ashikov,
Chief of the Khasavyurt criminal
investigation department Rasul Saduyev,
his subordinate
Gadzhimurad Imamirzoyev and of many
other officers of the local police as well as a federal judge and an
attorney. Eye-witnesses allege that search was only conducted in the
houses of ethnic Avars and are inclined to see ethnic context behind
the operation. Eye witnesses also said that following the end of the
special operation many households that had been searched in the
course of it were visited by a high-ranking police officer from
Makhachkala who offered his apologies and urged people to refrain
from possible intention to complain. It remained unclear whether the
Khasavyurt authorities were suspected of having links with the
militants. (IA Kavkazsky uzel
10.7.2008).

The first news of any considerable success in the
work of the security services came from Dagestan in the early autumn.
The result of several large-scale special operations in the
Khasavyurt and Derbent districts on September
4 and 7 – 8 were a total of
10 militants killed, including the veteran leader of the Khasavyurt
armed group Аskhab Bidayev
and the leader of the Derbent militant group Ilgar
Abdurakhman-ogly Mollachiev, both had
long been wanted by the federal police. The latter was known to the
Russian security as “the commander of the Dagestan front”
and the successor of Rappani Khalilov who was killed several years
ago and who was in charge of maintaining connections with the
Al-Qaida sponsors (New Times, 8.9.2008).

It should also be noted that on August
1 the anti-terrorist operation was
unexpectedly terminated in the
village of Gimry of the Untsukulsky district.
The President of the Republic Mukhu Aliev himself arrived to Gimry in
a helicopter in order to break the news to the local population
(http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m146744.htm).
According to the official data, over the 8 months of the operation,
two bunkers and two fortified trenches containing large caches with
weapons and ammunition had been discovered. Over this period the
security forces had succeeded in persuading 7 members of illegal
armed groups to voluntarily surrender, among those 7 was Bammatkhan
Sheikhov, who was commonly known to
have been the leader of the Buinaksk clandestine terrorist group. In
addition to that, the activity of one member of an illegal armed
group was neutralized, 17 persons, who had been on the wanted list,
were detained as were 19 persons suspected of aiding and abetting the
armed underground groups. However, the special operation had clearly
taken far longer that was intended and the further it went, the more
negative social implications it was bringing to the local population
who was sustaining ever greater economic losses. The operation was
declared to have come to an end. Nevertheless, several block posts in
the surrounding area remained as did the restrictions of freedom of
movement for the local residents.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m143187.htm).

The situation also
remained tense in the Republic of
Kabardino-Balkaria – the fact
which was recognized by the authorities themselves. People in the
Republic continue to keep a large quantity of firearms in private
use. Over the first 6 months of 2008 alone about 200 items of
firearms, 1,000 items of ammunition and 32 kg of explosives had been
seized. (RIA Novosti, 16.7.2008)
The President of the Republic Arsen Kanokov demanded in his speech
last summer to intensify the effort in combating terrorism and
extremism (Kavkazsky uzel, 28.8.2008

Developments in the Ingush crisis

The situation in Ingushetia is “not
simple, yet under control…Recently we have seen a rise in the
number of attempts on lives of law enforcement officers. Yet one can
speak of a notable improvement in the efficiency of work of our
security forces”, declared the
Ingush Minister of Interior Musa Medov on August
6 at a meeting with the President
of the Republic in Magas. “Law
enforcement officers are resolved to continue waging an
uncompromising battle against criminal elements”,
he added. (‘Respublika Ingushetia’
website, 6.8.2008). The federal
authorities are offered a still more idyllic picture: the
conversation between Murat Zyazikov with
Dmitry Medvedev
that took place on August 27
revolved around schools, birth rates, gasification, tackling the
dangers of avalanches. Each of these was the subject of praise for
success achieved and both presidents were clearly satisfied with the
results of their work (Respublika
Ingushetia website, 27.8.2008),

However, the reports from human rights activists and journalists
working in Ingushetia give a totally different picture. The Republic
has been swept by waves of violence both on the part of the
terrorists and those who are called to fight with them. This
immersion of the republic’s life into total violence is chiefly
detrimental to its civilian population. The authorities suppress any
attempts of dissidence, nipping all political opposition wishing to
operate within the framework of the Russian law in the bud and
driving it into the underground. Human rights activists come under
regular attacks. The last day of summer 2008 saw the political
assassination of the old opponent of the Ingush president upon the
arrival of the former into the republic.

The murder of the owner of the only opposition
website Ingushetyia.RuMagomed Yevloyev
at the Magas
airport on August 31
has become the most notorious and, to say the least, flagrant crime
of the authorities over the recent years.

This assassination was preceded by other cases of attacks on people
who were accusing the republican authorities and the law enforcement
and military agencies of human rights violations.

On July 25
unidentified officers of law enforcement structures abducted the
website editor of the Mashr human rights organisation Zurab
Tsechoyev. Six hours later he was
thrown out of the car on the road between the villages of Ekazhevo
and
Ali-Yurt. Tsechoyev had been badly
beaten and had to undergo long-term therapy in hospital. By the end
of the summer the human rights activist was hardly able to move after
the grave injuries he had received.

According to Tsechoyev’s own words, the
abductors had been beating him, accusing him of having put up lists
containing addresses of the local law enforcement officers on the
Ingushetiya.Ru
website. Tsechoyev vehemently denied his involvement in such a
publication, however, the abductors continued to torture him
demanding information about who exactly had given those lists to the
website editors. Several hours later, having understood that
Tsechoyev knows nothing about the matter, the abductors threw him out
onto the road having demanded that he quits his work for the human
rights organization
(http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/index.htm;http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/index.htm).

The criminal proceedings on the fact of abduction
of Zurab Tsechoyev were initiated pursuant to Part 3a of Article 286
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (exceeding official
powers without use of violence). Quite naturally, this qualification
of the offence committed against him did not satisfy the victim, who
justly believes that Part 3 of this Article is much more applicable
to his case. Nevertheless, as of the time of publication of this
bulletin none of the law enforcement officers suspected of having
exceeded their official powers have been identified.

On August 13, 2008 at
around 9 pm, in the city of Karabulak,
Ingushetia, unidentified persons
(allegedly police officers) opened fire in the vicinity of the office
of the Mashr human rights organisation, targeting its head Magomed
Mutsolgov. The fire was practically
point-blank yet above Mutsolgov’s head. The assailants were
passing by in a car without number plates and according to Mutsolgov,
at least one of the persons inside the car was wearing a police
uniform. It is quite obvious that this attack was an ostentatious
intimidation attempt
(http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m145156.htm)

The authorities have only now begun to openly
manifest a tendency to accuse their political opponents of
connections with the terrorist underground. Thus, following a
shooting attack on the house of the Ingushetia senator Isa Kostoyev,
the Ingush President’s administration declared that this may
have been an intimidation attempt on the part of the republican
opposition in response to Kostoyev’s active support of the
President Murat Zyazikov(‘Kommersant’, 25.8.2008).
Kostoyev had repeatedly sharply criticized the opposition going as
far as calling them ‘terrorists’ in one of his
interviews.

The abduction of Magomed Yevloev at the Magas airport which ended in
the death of the latter was explained by law enforcement officers
with their alleged intention to interrogate Yevloyev in connection
with the explosion near the house of a relative of the Deputy
Chairman of the Ingush parliament.

Yevloev arrived from Moscow
on the same flight as the President of
Ingushetia Murat Zyazikov. This
happened purely coincidentally: Yevloev arrived at the Moscow airport
with a ticket to Mineralniye Vody,
yet, learning that the Magas flight was delayed and that there were
vacant seats in the business class, he changed his ticket. Having
entered the cabin, he saw the President. Zyazikov and Yevloev were
flying to Magas in the same cabin, yet did not communicate with each
other during their journey.

Upon their arrival to Magas Zyazikov was met by
the Ingush Minister of Interior Musa
Medov. After the President’s car
moved away, several cars of the minister’s motorcade carrying
armed men approached the plane. The officers took Magomed Yevloev out
of the plane, put him into an armoured UAZ-vehicle and drove off in
the direction of Nazran.
A large group of relatives and friends were awaiting Yevloev at the
airport, among them was one of the opposition leaders Magomed
Khazbiev. Their attempt to follow the
car in which Yevloev was being taken away failed, one of the armoured
cars blocked the route. A clash with the police broke out and the
officers opened fire above the people’s heads but were then
disarmed by the crowd. According to their identity documents, they
were officers of the Guard of the Ministry of Interior. It is worth
mentioning that the police officers were shouting in Ingush: ‘We
have no blood on our hands’. At
the time, the friends and relatives of Magomed Yevloev did not
understand the meaning behind it. However, about half an hour after
his arrest at the airport, Magomed Yevloev was delivered to the
Central Clinical Hospital of Nazran with a grave gunshot wound in his
head. Shortly afterwards he died in hospital.

Yevloev’s funeral was held on September
1 in the village of Ekazhevo
of the Nazran district. The family of
the assassinated opposition leader had departed from the usual
funeral tradition: the funeral procession headed not for the village
cemetery but for the city of Nazran. At about midday the procession
stopped in the centre of the city near the bus station. A spontaneous
rally gathered. Among those who spoke before the people were former
member of the Ingush parliament Bamat-Giri
Mankiev, representatives of the Ingush
opposition Maksharip Aushev, Magomed
Khazbiev, Akhmed Kotiev, and others.
All of them believed the murder was not an accident and accused the
leaders of the republican Ministry of Interior and President Murat
Zyazikov of involvement in the assassination. In his speech Magomed
Khazbiev called upon the leaders of Russia to remove Zyazikov from
the government of Ingushetia. Should the Russian government fail to
satisfy this demand, Khazbiev claimed that the opposition would bring
up the question of secession of Ingushetia from the Russian
Federation. After that, Yevloev’s body was taken away to the
village of Ekazhevo
where he was buried at the village cemetery. The rally in Nazran was
resumed. According to different sources and estimations, it had
gathered about 1,000 participants which is an impressive figure for a
city as small as Nazran, where over the past year all public actions
and rallies were invariably harshly suppressed while participants in
such were charged with various criminal offences
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146723.htm,www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146312.htm).

Towards the evening, the majority of protesters
left the square and went home and by the morning of September 1 there
were only about 50 people left on the square. At around 5.40
am the law enforcement officers,
who were present at the rally and by that time had already
outnumbered the number of protesters, began to disperse the
demonstration. The participants attempted to resist by throwing
stones at the policemen. This was met with several warning shots into
the air. The rally was dispersed. Nobody was detained and there were
no injuries.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146320.htm).

The
reaction of the republican authorities was highly predictable.
President Murat Zyazikov, who, according to his words, “had no
personal acquaintance” with the victim, dismissed the incident
with the conventional words about “a tremendous human tragedy”
and “all necessary actions” being taken by the
investigators: criminal investigation
was launched pursuant to Article 109 Part 2 (infliction of death by
negligence owing
to improper discharge by a person of his professional duties) of the
Criminal Code
of the Russian Federation (Respublika
Ingushetia website, 1.9.2008).
The only version upon which the investigators set off working from
the first hours after the murder was “Yevloev
had picked a squabble with the police officers inside the car
attempting to whip the submachine gun off the hands of one of them.
During the brief struggle a shot from the pistol followed and
M.Yevloev was accidentally wounded in the head”,
said the Republican Public Prosecutor Yu.
Turygin
(IA,
Interfax, 31.8.2008).

In
its press release of August 31 the HRC Memorial declared the
assassination to have been “another act of state terror”
and “a demonstrative and cynical
crime”(www.memo.ru/2008/09/01/0109081.htm).
On September 4, 2008 the Russia human rights activists (Ludmila
Alexeeva, Svetlana Gannushkina, Oleg Orlov, Sergey Kovalev, Lev
Ponomarev and Yuri Samodurov) called
upon the Russian authorities to create an extraordinary investigation
team of the Prosecutor’s General Office of the Russian
Federation
to investigate the circumstances of the murder of Magomed Yevloev,
suspend, at least for the duration of investigation, the President
and the Minister of Interior of the Republic of Ingushetia from their
positions, since both of them appear to perfectly qualify as suspects
in this case. They also called upon the authorities to choose in
favour of a dialogue with Ingushetia’s and Dagestan’s
civil society
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146722.htm).

None of these
demands were ever satisfied. The investigation of the murder was
declared completed in October 2008 and sent to the court with the
prosecution statement remaining as it was in the beginning.

Thus,
the Ingush opposition lost yet another one of its leaders. It should
be reminded that another Ingush opposition leader Maksharip
Aushev,
who had also been target of persecution on the part of the
authorities, had spent several months in detention in the early 2008.
He and his “accomplices” (Ismail
Barakhoyev, Ramazan Kulov, Ruslan Khazbiev and Salman Gazdiev) were
charged with organization of, and participation in, an illegal rally
in Nazran on January 24. Only on July 6-7, following declaration of a
hunger strike, the detained were released from the Temporary
Detention Unit under recognizance not to leave the city. As of the
end of September the situation remained unchanged: the organizers of
the rally were still under investigation, the restraint measures also
remained the same.

12 days before the murder of Magomed Yevloev, on
August 18, the HRC Memorial published
its new reportIngushetia:
New methods of counter-terror. Licence to kill?(see
www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m144162.htm),
which focuses on the principal trend of development of the
anti-terrorist operation in Ingushetia over the past 6 months (from
the start of 2007). The trend can be summarized as follows: “when
conducting special operations in detention of persons suspected of
participation in the activities of illegal armed groups, security
forces most frequently opt for destruction of suspects rather than
their detention. In the majority of cases eye witnesses claim that
the killed people had offered no armed resistance, in fact, there
were no attempts to even detain them”.
According to the data collected by the Memorial? over 2007 alone
security services had killed 26 persons
suspected of membership in illegal armed groups
in the course of special operations in allegedly their detention.
Only three of those killed had apparently offered resistance. In all
other cases we have every reason to believe that the people were
killed in the course of simulated battle. Earlier we spoke about the
further spread of this practice. From January until August 5, 2008,
26 others were killed in the course of a special operation, 12 of
them had offered no resistance, according to eye witnesses

Here is a typical example in support of the above-said.

On August 2, 2008 in
the Plievsky municipal district of
Nazran federal military officers killed
two local residents: Hamzat Izmailovich
Gardanov, born
in 1978, resident of Gorchkhanova
ul.,39,
and Daud Magomedovich Chibiev,
born in 1982, resident of Murzabekova
ul., 21
(http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m142893.htm).

At about 1 pm unidentified persons driving a
silver-coloured VAZ-21114 vehicle opened fire at a VAZ-21112 vehicle
carrying two police officers. The incident happened at the
intersection of the Oskanova
and Kotieva streets.
The police officers were wounded as a result of the attack. The place
of the incident and the adjacent streets were blocked by federal
security services and the republican police forces. Soon after the
security forces let a passenger car in which two local residents,
Gardanov and Chibiev, were driving back home from the market, inside
the cordon/ One of the security officers called out and suddenly
opened gunfire at the passing car. Gardanov and Chibiev jumped out of
it and attempted to flee. Dense fire for effect was opened in their
backs from guns and a automatic machine gun. Gardanov received fatal
wounds and was killed on the spot. Chibiev was wounded, according to
eye-witnesses, yet he managed to escape into the nearest yard. Dense
fire was opened targeting the nearby yards. Many eye witnesses claim
that Gardanov and Chibiev did not offer any armed resistance.

There have been testimonies from eye witnesses who
saw how the officers planted a pistol near Gardanov’s body
(having previously made several shots with it) and 3 cartridge clips.
The next morning, August 3, the body of Daud Chibiev was discovered
in one of the gardens not far from ulitsa
Sholokhova. According to the statement
of the Temporary Forces headquarters, Gardanov and Chibiev were shot
following their refusal to leave the secure area. The Military
Prosecutor’s had launched an inquiry into the legality of
application of firearms in respect of the two passenger of the
trespassing car. However, the families of the killed men are not
allowed to see the materials of the case since they have not been
recognized as victims. The Prosecutor’s office a priori base
their actions on the assumption that the killed men were members of
militant groups.

It should be noted that Hamzat Gardanov was the
brother of Adam Izmailovich Gardanov, born in 1985, killed by the
officers of the FSB Department for Ingushetia on February7, 2007
in Nazran together with Magomed
Chakhkiev under similar circumstances(see
the report).

Nevertheless, in a situation when the civil confrontation in
Ingushetia is increasingly spreading outside the boundaries of the
legal framework, representatives of the civil society for the time
being maintain possibilities for legal protection of their interests
with judicial authorities. Two examples of this were the victories of
the Regional Public Movement “The Chechen Committee for
National Salvation” in court. Starting from 2007 this
organization has been subjected to regular audits of its charter and
financial activities.

Since August 2007 representatives of the Chechen
Committee for National Salvation were seeking repeal of the Act
on Counteraction and of the written
Warning unfoundedly
issued in respect of this organization by the FSB Department in the
Republic of Ingushetia based on the results of a so-called
“unscheduled field check”. As it emerged in the course of
the court hearings, the ground for the check became a
memorandum of the Head of the FSB Department in Ingushetia Colonel
Igor Bondarev to the Department of the
Federal Registration Service. Thisofficerofthesecurityservice
claimed that “under cover of
alleged human rights campaigning the RPM “The Chechen Committee
for National Salvation” pursues other goals quite different
from the ones indicated in its statutory documents, namely:
officers of this organisation are actively collecting negative
materials concerning the social and economic situation in Ingushetia,
which is subsequently published on the Ingushetiya.Ru website in a
deliberately distorted form”. Furthermore,
ColonelBondarevassertsthattheanalysisofthedataavailabletothesecurityserviceshadshown
that the organisation“is
the key information source of the Ingushetiya.Ru website, which has
been demonstrating a pronounced anti-Russian stance and its aim to
discredit the initiatives of the federal centre directed at
stabilisation of the social and political situation in the republic
and in the region on the whole”.

ThefactthattheCommitteereceivesgrantsfrominternationalstructureshadservedasthegroundfortheheadoftheFSBDepartmenttosuggest a possibility of “them
being financed by extremist movements from abroad”
and request from the Department of the Federal Registration Service
for Ingushetia to carry out an audit of the organizations activities
with a view to its compliance with its charter and the law on
non-governmental organizations.

The audit resulted in the above-mentioned Act
on Counteraction and Warning,
which endow the authorities with instruments allowing them to bring
up the possibility of closing down the organization in the future.

On July 10, 2008,
the Panel of Judges of the Supreme Court of the Republic of
Ingushetia examined the cassation appeal of the Chechen Committee for
National Salvation against the decision of the Nazran District Court
of April 3, 2008
dismissing its action against the Federal Registration Service
Department for Ingushetia.

The Chairman of the Panel of Judges M.Daurbekov
examined the arguments of the attorneys of this organization with
great thoroughness, taking an unbiased stance in consideration of
every little detail. As a result, the Panel of Judges of the Supreme
Court of the Republic of Ingushetia determined in favour of granting
the petition of the plaintiff – the Regional Public Movement
“The Chechen Committee for National Salvation” and
reversing the decision of the Nazran District Court of April 3, 2008,
sending the case for second consideration to the same court
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m139273.htm).

On September 12
the Nazran District Court of the Republic of Ingushetia rendered its
verdict on illegality of the actions of the former Department of the
Federal Registration Service in respect of the Regional Public
Movement “The Chechen Committee for National Salvation”.
The interests of the latter were represented in court by attorney
Batyr Akhilgov.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146739.htm).
We can therefore acknowledge a rare
case of victory of representatives of the civil society over a
Department of FSB.

It should be remembered that the charges of
extremism against the Chechen Committee for National Salvation had
been pending since 2004. At that time the action on recognition of
the materials published by the Committee as containing extremist
appeals was submitted to the court by the Prosecutor’s Office
of the Republic of Ingushetia, yet in reality, the FSB Department in
Ingushetia was behind those steps of the Prosecutor’s Office.
However, the representatives of the Committee were able to avail
themselves of highly qualified defence services during the trials,
and the charges were somehow naturally “forgotten”. The
materials provided by the linguistic expertise had been “lost”,
and the Prosecutor’s Office no longer insisted on examination
of its submission in court.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2004/09/m23103.htm).

The
Vostok battalion and its involvement in international and inter-clan
hostilities

From the very onset of the Russian-Georgian war
in August units of the Chechen-staffed battalion of the 126th
motorized rifle regiment of the 42th guard motorized rifle division
of the Russian Ministry of Defence, known as the Vostok battalion.
According to the media agencies Kavkazsky
uzel and Interfax
the peace-keeping forces also included a squadron of another Chechen
battalion of the Russian Defence Ministry Forces – the Zapad
battalion. Later, in September President of Chechnya R.Kadyrov
claimed that detachments of both battalions – Vostok and Zapad
had taken part in the “peace-keeping” mission (Russia
Today, 8.9.2008). In any event, the former had become a true
news-making hero of the five-day war, while the latter had not been
mentioned even once by the media in connection with the
Georgian-Ossetian conflict, apart from the above-mentioned
declarations.

Regarding the Vostok battalion, it is known for
sure that several of its squadrons had been serving in South Ossetia
since autumn 2007
as part of the peace-keeping forces and following the breakout of
active hostilities its main forces were brought into the territory of
the unrecognized republic. According to the “Russian Newsweek”,
those units broke into Tskhinvali
on the night of August 8,
having approached the town of Zarskoy
via a bypass road (Russian
Newsweek, 25- 31.8.2008).

The available data concerning the losses sustained
by the Vostok battalion differ drastically and in all probability
cannot be confirmed by open resources in the foreseeable future.
Thus, according to the IA Kavkazsky Uzel
website, one of the Vostok combatants spoke of the losses sustained
by their battalion as having been “rather significant”.
However, another member of these forces told an IA
Rosbalt correspondent that out of 200
combatants who entered Tskhinvali during the open hostilities not a
single one had been killed (IA
Robalt-Yug, 15.8.2008). The Vostok
major claimed that the battalion had three of its combatants wounded
(Utro.Ru, 22/8/2008). Finally, later still the President of Chechnya
Ramzan Kadyrov told in his interview to the Russia Today channel:
“Our guys have not lost a single person, despite being in the
very forefront of the battles all this time” (Russia Today,
8.9.2008).

One should also not fail to specifically note the
moral effect made by the Chechen forces on both their adversary and
on the Ossetian civilians and journalists. Almost everybody spoke of
the proverbial brutality and the charm of the notorious war dogs, who
were frequently weaponed not at all according to their rank. The
mentality oftheChechencombatsthemselves, whounexpectedly found themselves in the
position of fighting outsiders in a war that was not their own, also
deserves special attention. Theyundoubtedlyperceivethemselvesascitizens of the Russian Federation, members
of the Russian armed forces, defending the interests of their
country. Yet, theydistancethemselvesin
every possiblewayfrom
the otherarmytroops, yet not on the grounds of
nationality or religion but on the grounds of their professionalism:
“Why did they bring these lads out here? This time it should be
up to us, elite professionals, to take up the fight”, such was
their rhetoric, when looking at the draft soldiers passing by in
armoured vehicles. – Hey guys! Relax! We are here with you!”.
All the bodies of Georgian soldiers seen by media correspondents were
accredited by the Chechen combats to their own exploits (IA
Rosbalt-Yug, 15.8.2008).

What should be specifically stressed is the fact
that the unexpectedly positive and even, in some sources, almost
poetic image of the Vostok battalion (the “Russian
Newsweek” described it as
“StrakhBat” – “a battalion inspiring fear”)
– is the product of this brief war between Russia and Georgia.
It is no secret that when it came to the civil war in Chechnya, the
battalion had until recently enjoyed quite a different sort of fame
there, and was far from encouraging media representatives’
presence at the scene of their operations. Here, the Vostok suddenly
found itself in the zone of hostilities which was swarming with
journalists. Unlike other soldiers of the other military units and
detachments, the battalion combats agreed to pose together with the
journalists on top of their armoured vehicles. The result came in the
form of dozens of articles in the media telling about the combat
record of the battalion. The impressed correspondents did their best
to emphasize the contrast between these bearded war dogs and the
“apparently scared blondish boys” – the soldiers of
the 58th
army, many of whom, by the way, believed in the beginning that they
were being sent to take part in exercises, not a real war.

On the whole, regardless of the differing opinions concerning the
activities of the Vostok battalion and its chief inside Chechnya, one
has to recognize that its active participation in the
Russian-Georgian war had done a lot in the way of promoting the
identification of Chechens as co-citizens in the Russian public
conscience.

Another detail not to be omitted is the fact that
the battalion operated under the command of Colonel Sulim
Yamadayev – the very one who
had spent the preceding months at daggers drawn with the President of
Chechnya R.Kadyrov and whose discharge and arrest were actively
sought by the latter. In our spring bulletin we featured the conflict
between Kadyrov and the Yamadayev clan as the central factor
responsible for destabilizing the situation in the region (see
www.memo.ru/2008/07/06/0607081.htm).
According to IA Grozny-Inform,
in early August this year (the date was not indicated) the Gudermes
inter-district investigative department declared Yamadayev wanted on
the federal level (IA Grozny-Inform,
22.8.2008, see also: IA Kavkazsky uzel, 6.8.2008).
Nevertheless, photosofasmilingYamadayev
with his Hero of the Russian Federation Star and six rows of service
ribbons were actively presented by the Russian media alongside with
his interviews during the war (IA
Rosbalt-Yug, 15.8.2008). Direct
questions of media correspondents as to why he was fighting in the
midst of the war instead of being in prison, were parried by
Yamadayev with jokes as he claimed he had recently been undergoing a
course of treatment at a Moscow hospital up until August
8 and was far from hiding from
anyone before being “invited” to fight for Russia
(Russian Newsweek, 25-31.8.2008).
The latter claim appears to be rather strange considering that he was
officially discharged from commanding the battalion back in June
(Kommersant, 23.8.2008).
That had been confirmed by members of his family even before the war
broke out (Kommersant, 7.8.2008).

Apparently, thepersonalloyaltyofthemembersoftheVostokbattaliontoSulimYamadayevhasnotbeenshatteredintheleast, despitethereshufflesthathadaffectedthe
combatant capacity of the battalion and the long absence of its chief
away from Chechnya. The situation of
Yamadayev himself in Chechnya remains unchanged – he is an
undesirable element in the eyes of its authorities. The fact that the
Chechen media had completely “overlooked” all involvement
of the Vostok battalion in South Ossetia, -although they would have
been expected to be the first to jump at the opportunity to praise
the exploits of their combats, - is not at all coincidental.

The outcome of yet
another round of thepowerstruggleofthePresidentofChechnyawiththerebellioussecurityserviceswaswitnessedonAugust
21, 2008,whenthenews came of the discharge of Sulim
Yamadaev to join the reserve forces while retaining his military rank
taking effect on that very day. The order was signed by the Minister
of Defence A.Serdyukov (RIA
Novosti,21.8.2008).
It is interesting that the Chechen Investigative Department of the
Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s of the
Russian Federation promptly announced that the ex-combat is no longer
wanted on suspicion of his involvement in a murder since his
whereabouts have been established. It remained unclear whether the
charges against him had been dropped. At any rate, it was made clear
that he was no longer subject to prosecution (Kommersant,
23.8.2008). This served as a perfection
confirmation Yamadaev’s own words claiming that his persecution
by the prosecuting authorities had the sole purpose of ousting him
out of Chechnya.

Thus, Ramzan Kadyrov came as a winner in yet
another one of his clashes with the law enforcement authorities. His
influence at a racing show in Moscow, among the top ruling circles is
extremely strong. It is quite obvious that his appearance in Moscow
shortly before the order on his discharged was sign was no
coincidence (Kommersant, 18.8.2008).
ConsideringthesadfateofsomepastadversariesofthePresidentofChechnyaoutofthesecurityservicesranks, SulimYamadayevshouldprobablybelievehimself lucky having got out of this
episode of his life safe and sound, and even retaining his rank and
his awards. According to ‘Kommersant’’s
sources, he may even be offered the position of the Defence Minister
of South Ossetia or Abkhazia (Kommersant,
23.8.2008).

Р.S. On September
25 the former brigadier general of
Maskhadov’s army, the former deputy of the military commandant
of the Chechen Republic, the former head of the regional division of
the United Russia Party in Chechnya, the former member of the State
Duma Ruslan Yamadayev was shot dead in
the centre of Moscow, in the vicinity
of the governmental complex.

Practice
of abductions by security services resumed
in Chechnya

Over the period since
May 2008 the
Memorial Human Rights Centre has registered a rise in the number of
abductions occurring in Chechnya. This increase came after a
considerable period of relative tranquility when only a few isolated
cases of abductions and enforced disappearances were registered…
On the whole, the Memorial statistical data show that the total
number of person abducted over the three summer months was 15, of
whom 8 were abducted in the month of August alone
(www.memo.ru/2008/06/19/1906081.htm).
Quite naturally, these numbers cannot be considered to be exhaustive.
Earlier we believed that our statistical data cover between 50% and
one third of this type of crime. However, recently the percentage of
such crimes that never comes to the knowledge of either the
Prosecutor’s Office or human rights organizations has obviously
increased.

Four persons abducted were released by their
abductors a few days later. However, the
victims of abductions and their family members normally decline to
provide staff of the Memorial with any details concerning the
incidents. This problem of reluctance to testify is quite common in
Chechnya (the same goes for frequent refusals of eye witnesses of
abductions to give their testimonies, of medical personnel to
register bodily injuries etc) and quite clearly demonstrates the
degree of fear of the uncontrolled and unpunished arbitrariness of
security services ruling among the population of the republic.
Another four abductees were discovered by their families several days
after their abduction at district departments of interior. By that
time police officers would have normally succeeded in obtaining from
them confessionary statements, mainly through use of torture. Seven
persons of the total number of the abducted remain missing to date.

Below we will examine
several cases of such abductions as an example.

On
June 24 in Grozny
a local resident Mayrbek Amkhatovich
Magomadov, born in 1986, was abducted
presumably by officers of the Chechen Republican OMON. According to
eye witnesses, Mayrbek was taken away from his ‘workplace’
- a multi-storey building in which he was working as a plasterer. In
the evening of that same day the Magomadov family was visited by
armed men wearing OMON officer uniform. They searched the house
without producing any identification or authorising documents. The
family was able to find out that the first 24 hours after his arrest
were spent by Mayrbek at the deployment base of the republican OMON
in Grozny, after that he was handed over to the Department for
Combating Organised Crime (OBOP) and yet two days later he was
returned to the OMON base. All information concerning the whereabouts
of Mayrbek was received through unofficial channels, who had sources
inside the OMON and OBOP units. No official explanations or comments
have ever been provided concerning the detention of Mayrbek
Magomadov. The Magomadov family appealed to the Memorial Human Rights
Centre with a statement as well as filed a complaint with the Public
Prosecutor’s Office
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/06/m138036.htm).

One and a half months
after his abduction, on August 12 the Memorial office received
another statement from Amra Magomadova – the mother of Mayrbek
Magomadov. She stated that her son was back at home and she,
therefore, was asking for cancellation of her previous statement.
Amra Magomadova declined, however, to tell the Memorial about the
whereabouts of Mayrbek at that
time.(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m143677.htm).

On
July 18 at 2.00 am in the
village of Pobedinskoye in the Grozny (rural) districtof the Chechen Republic
officers of unidentified security service abducted a local resident -
Muslim Nurdiyevich Yeshurkayev,
born in 1989, resident of Mirnaya st.,
56, from his home. The security service
offices (numbering up to 20 persons) drove to his house in four cars.
Without giving any explanations, they seized Muslim Yeshurkayev and
took him away in an unknown direction. A day earlier, on July 17, at
dawn, Muslim’s half-brother (his mother’s son from her
first marriage) Said-Emin Almanovich
Isupkhadzhiev, resident of the borough
of “Novaya ostanovka” of the
Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny,
was abducted from his home.

For
two subsequent days the families of the abducted men were unable to
establish their whereabouts, after which they turned for help to an
acquaintance of theirs who served in the Chechen security forces and
who was able to tell them that M.N.Yeshurkayev and S.-E. A.
Isupkhadzhiev were being kept at the temporary detention facility of
the Achkhoy-Martan Department of Interior. According to the family
members of the abducted men, when they arrived at the Achkhoy-Martan
Department of Interior, its officers were bewildered and perplexed
upon discovering that the family had been able to trace the two
brothers. The parents of Yeshurkayev succeeded in obtaining an
opportunity to meet with Muslim and from his words they learnt that
he and Said-Emin had been tortured with electric current, beaten on
the backs of their heads with a bottle filled with water. They were
forced to acknowledge involvement in laying a cache on the edge of
the village of Stary Achkhoy.
Under the pressure and tortures Muslim agreed to lead the security
officers to the location of the alleged cache laid by him together
with his uncle, Abu Abumuslimovich
Isupkhadhziev, who was killed last May
in the course of a special operation, when he was also photographed
while pointing at the weapons with his finger. Having found out the
whereabouts of the two brothers, their parents hired an attorney to
defend Muslim. The interests of Said-Emin are represented by a public
defender.

The
investigators demand from the brothers to stick to their initial
testimonies which were obtained under pressure. They have been
promised that if they obey, their sentences would be reduced as they
would be convicted pursuant to Article 208 Part 2 of the Criminal
Code of the Russian Federation (as if they had only been accomplices
of their late uncle Abu in hiding the weapons). The defence attorney
of Yeshurkayev, Makhmud Dzhaparovich
Magamadov, has been recommending his
client not to confess to crimes he had not committed and believes
that such bargain would be unacceptable. The defence attorney of
Isupkhadzhiev, Ziyaudi Madiev,
suggests that his client agrees to the proposed bargain. The
investigation of the case is currently nearing its completion and
will soon be transferred to court.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m143679.htm).

On
August 3, 2008 in the city of
Grozny
unidentified persons wearing camouflage uniform abducted Mokhmadsalah
Denilovich Masayev, born in 1966, in
the village of Itum-Kale, Chechen
Republic, up to the moment of his
disappearance he was residing in Moscow.

According to the brother
of the abducted man, Oleg Masayev,
Mokhmadsalah arrived to Chechnya on August
2 to attend the funeral of his
older sister. Having spent the entire day at the funeral,
Mokhmadsalah took a taxi to the village
of Sernovodsk in the Sunzhensky district of the Chechen Republic
to see his wife and children who were staying with some relation of
theirs. The next day the family learnt that Mokhmadsalah had been
seized by men wearing camouflage uniform in the central mosque of
Grozny where he would normally go to perform namaz.

Having obtained this information, Oleg Masayev
went to report disappearance to the
Zavodskoy district Department of Interior but his report was not
accepted. From his conversation with the police officers there he
learnt that his brother had been detained upon orders from the
republican authorities. Only after repeated and insistent demands of
human rights activists, the police authorities declared that the fact
of refusal to take a report on abduction was being investigated by
them and search activities were underway with the purpose of
establishing the whereabouts of Mokhmadsalah Masayev. No criminal
proceedings have been initiated so far.

Earlier, on March 18,
2008 Mokhmadsalah Masayev was
recognized as a victim in criminal case No 55096 on his unlawful
detention in the mosque of the town of
Gudermes together with M.A.Deniev
and V.A. Sigauri.
They spent four months in an illegal prison. After his release
Masayev appealed for help to Russian and international human rights
organisations, among them were Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, Memorial.

On
July 10, 2008 he gave an interview
to “Novaya gazeta” in which he testified against the
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. According to Masayev, he arrived to
Chechnya from Moscow in September 2006 with the purpose of peaceful
preaching of Islam to believers: “A
preacher as I am, I teach people to respect laws and the authorities,
to keep peace and maintain faith in one God”.
However, his first attempt to preach in one of Grozny’s mosque
(“We had spent a few hours at one
of the mosques: I was praying, preaching peace to Muslims…”)
already encountered hostility on the part of its mufti. He spent one
night in detention at a police station. The second preaching attempt
of Masayev and his friends ended up in their four months imprisonment
at a military base in the village of Tsentoroy, where they were kept
in an empty coach body all the time. Masayev had repeatedly undergone
severe beatings. On several occasions he was taken out to meet Ramzan
Kadyrov, who assumed a patronizing and condescending attitude and
finally released Masayev and his friends telling them that they had
been imprisonment “upon orders from the mufti of Chechnya
Sultan
Mirzayev”(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m143077.htm).

Later on in this
bulletin we will describe in greater detail why the official civil
authorities and religious leaders of Chechnya demonstrate extreme
suspicion of, and hostility towards, any attempts to preach the
Islamic faith on an unofficial basis, perceiving such actions as
propaganda of Wahhabism and religious extremism.

The fate of Mokhmadsalah
Masayev remains unknown to date. We have every reason to believe that
his disappearance may have come as revenge from the republic’s
authorities for the fact that he, unlike many others in his
situation, was not afraid to openly demand investigation of
violations committed against him. Speaking of this, it has to be
noted that the other person who was kept together with Masayev in
illegal detention in Tsentoroy for four months was killed in a car
crash in Chechnya last July.

On
August 16 at 5.00 am in
the village of Mesker-Yurt in the Shali district of the Chechen
Republic officers of unidentified
security forces abducted local resident Ayub Khizrievich Muslimov,
born in 1983, residing at Tsvetochnaya
str., 6.
Up to 30 armed men wearing masks and camouflage uniform broke into
the house of the Muslimov family. Ayub himself and his parents, who
attempted to defend him, were beaten up. After that Ayub was dragged
outside and forced into one of the cars in which the abductors came
and the cars drove off in an unknown direction. Ayub Muslimov works
together with his uncle at one of the construction sites in the city
of Grozny. His colleagues and villagers speak highly of him, while
his parents are at a loss as what the reasons for such abduction may
have been. As of the date of publication of this bulletin, the
whereabouts of Ayub Muslimov remained unknown.

It has also come to the
knowledge of the Memorial Human Rights Centre that over the period
from August 16 to 17 another two locals had also been abducted in the
village of Mesker-Yurt: Isa Lechievich
Sinborigov,born
in 1977, attorney, and Ismail
Salavdievich Minkailov. They were
released on August 19.
The grounds for, and the place of, their detention remain unclear as
both men have declined to comment on the incident
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m146317.htm)

On
August 18 at about 7.30 pm in the
Leninsky district of Grozny, officers
of an unidentified security force abducted Tamerlan
Dakayevich Nasipov, born in 1988, from
his home at Bolshaya str., 77.
Unidentified armed men wearing masks and camouflage outfits broke
into the house of the Nasipov family. They seized Tamerlan Nasipov
without any explanations and without introducing themselves took him
away with them.

Tamerlan had already been taken away by ORB-2
officers in early August 2008.
His parents only learnt about it on Saturday, when they were
contacted by an unidentified individual on the phone and told that
Tamerlan and Akhmed were in the village of Goyty of the Urus-Martan
district and suggested that the parents come and pick them up. That
person did not identify himself and did not say where exactly
Tamerlan and Akhmed could be found.

The family of Tamerlan of Tamerlan went to the
village of Goyty. According to his father,
Dokka Nasipov,
it was by pure chance that they found their boys and were able to
take them home (Dokka Nasipov declined for the time being to
elaborate on what exactly had happened in the village of Goyty). On
August 18
the parents of Tamerlan filed a written complaint on the fact of his
abduction with the Leninsky district Department of Interior. The
complain was accepted yet the officers of the Department refused to
register it alleging that they first needed to visit the scene of
abduction and examine it as well as interrogate eye witnesses.

Tamerlan Dokkayevich Nasipov is a 5-year student
of the Chechen State Oil Institute.

Three days after his
abduction Tamerlan Nasipov came back home. Any attempts to find out
who had abducted him and where he had been kept failed since the
Nasipov family declined to comment on the matter
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m146318.htm).

Talking of the resumed
practice of abductions in Chechnya, one has to mention the unlawful
detention of several of the Memorial staff members in the village of
Goyty which, fortunately, caused them no more than stress and moral
damage.

On
June 17, 2008 at about 5.15 pm several
staff members of the Memorial office in Grozny – Shakhman
Akbulatov, Zarema Mukusheva, Milana Bakhayeva,
and their driver Yaragi Gayrbekov
- were detained in the village of Goyty
in the Urus-Martan district.

The alleged reason for the
arrest was unauthorized video recording of the premises belonging to
the ‘Solnechny’ state farm. On a purely formal basis the
premises were owned by the village police department. However,
numerous sources alleged that inside this building abducted and
illegally detained people were frequently kept. Some of them had
subsequently gone missing.

Men wearing plain clothes introduced
themselves as “security officers” and first took away the
documents and the camera of our detained colleagues and then took the
people themselves to the Urus-Martan district police department. In
response to the question whether that was an official detention, they
said that it was a regular identity check.

Inside the Department of
Interior building, police officers learnt that the detained were
staff members of the Memorial and started bringing most preposterous
charges against them for their alleged involvement in transferring
information to various websites disloyal to the current authorities,
like KavkazCenter and Ingushetiya.Ru, and of them being paid for it
with “the Wahhabi money”. The documents carried by the
Memorial staff and their car were searched without any warrant.

Finally, one person in
plain clothes, who was apparently some kind of chief there, declared
that human rights campaigners had allegedly described him as “the
leader of a gang which practises kidnapping and killing of people”
and that that was just the right moment “to confirm their
suspicions”: “You have been
poking into where you shouldn’t have and now you are going to
regret it bitterly”. One of the
officers present there said: “We
should have taken them to Alkhazurovo, where our comrades were killed
and shoot them down there” (the
reference is apparently to the militants’ attack on that
village on March 19, 2008). This threat was voiced again in another
room later.

In the meantime, news of
human rights workers having been arrested were broadcast by the
Interfax agency, the ‘Ekho Moskvy’ radio station and
other media resources. The publicity did serve its purpose.

At about 7:30 pm
the detained human rights activists were released. Before that,
however, Akbulatov and Mukusheva were required to give written
explanatory statements. The video recording made in Goyty was
destroyed.

The Memorial Human
Rights Centre considers the arrest of its staff members in the
village of Goyty and the confiscation of the video recording made by
them to be a blatant violation. The police officers of the
Urus-Martan Department of Interior had also broken the rules of
criminal procedure, for example, regarding their refusal to allow the
detained get in touch with their attorney. Finally, the repeatedly
voiced death threats contain constituent elements of offence. The
Memorial Human Rights Centre appealed to the Public Prosecutor’s
Office in connection with this incident and is pressing for an
inquiry into this violation and for punishment for those responsible
despite the apparent reluctance of law enforcement officers to
initiate any measures in this regard
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/06/m135934.htm).

Cases of Human Rights Violations
in Dagestan

New instances of abduction and torture have been
registered in Dagestan, where such cases are normally attributed to
the activities of the so-called “6” or ”The Sixth
Department” and its officers commonly known as “shestoviks”
(the term used in Dagestan to refer to the local UBOP (Department for
Combating Organised Crime) and UBEiUT (Department for Combating
Extremism and Criminal Terrorism). These names have long become just
as proverbial in Dagestan as ATTs2
or ORB-2 used to be in Chechnya in their own time3.

One of those who had
undergone severe tortures at the hands of these services, German
Hidirov, quoted the words he had heard from his torturers in his
statement sent to the human rights movement “Mothers of
Dagestan:”

“We
are the new jama’at, who has declared a war on such Muslims
like yourself. We are all elite, first class fighters in our
department, who have gone through a rough school and we all have
blood of such bastards as you and your uncle on our hands”.
These words are very characteristic of the way the “shestoviks”
tend to perceive their role themselves. The people who were torturing
Hidirov had repeatedly attempted to enter into ‘religious
disputes’ with him, as if attempting to convince him that they
were pursuing a godly purpose by destroying Hidirov and the ilk.

The story of
disappearance of Ilyas Sharipov,
who was arrested on May 1,2008
in Khasavyurt,
had its sequel. Over the period following his arrest his whereabouts
were frequently unknown to his family and lawyers and when they would
finally manage to find him and meet with him, his body bore apparent
marks of beatings and torture and he himself was in an inadequate
mental condition. Following numerous appeals and complaints from his
father, Rasul Sharipov, to various authorities as well as
participation of the latter in all possible protest actions, torture
practices ceased yet his son’s condition continued to rapidly
deteriorate. Nothing had been done in the way of investigation of the
beatings he had been subjected to and no official recognition of the
fact of application of tortures has been achieved, although medical
expertise had confirmed presence of haematomae on his body (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 21/7/2008).

Two similar arrests with subsequent disappearance
of the suspects, out of their families’ sight at least, took
place on July 24 and 25,
when 30-year-old Аli Zalitinov
and 29-year-old Idris Guchakayev were
detained in the presence of eye witnesses by armed men in plain
clothes, who introduced themselves as officers of the “sixth
department” and were taken away in an unknown direction. On
June 27,
the family members of the abducted men held a picket in the centre of
Makhachkala blocking a major thoroughfare – Prospect Yargskogo
– and only agreed to leave following a promise from the
Republican Public Prosecutor I.Tkachev
to clarify the situation with the men’s current whereabouts.
Very soon the family members were told that the detained men were
kept at the Makhachkala and Buynaksk temporary detention facilities,
however, it remained unclear what exactly they had been charged with
(IA Kavkazsky uzel, 4.7.2008).
Later the defence attorney of Ali Zalitinov told the Memorial that he
was only able to meet with his client 9 days after his actual arrest.
By that time Zalitinov had been placed into hospital because of his
precarious condition, his body bore marks of beatings. The attorney
took photos of those marks with his mobile phone, including a large
hematoma on the right side of his body.According to Zalitinov’s
and Guchakayev’s testimonies, they had been beaten in order to
force them to confess their involvement in commission of various
crimes. Guchakayev had suffered especially grave harm to his health,
which continues to affect his current condition. As of October
2008, the investigation was underway. Zalitinov and Guchakayev had
been charged with criminal offences pursuant to the following
articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: Art. 105
(murder), Art. 317 (Encroachment on the
life of an officer of a law-enforcement agency), Art.
222 (Illegal
Transfer of Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Explosive Devices).
After the families had found attorneys to defend the two detained
men, both of them retracted the testimonies given by them under
torture.

Another factor to be mentioned here is a number of
rather questionable operations, which resulted in the deaths of some
of the Republic’s prominent personalities. For example,
R.Gazilaliev, a lecturer at the faculty
of foreign languages of the Dagestan State Institute of Education,
his wife and an unidentified man were shot dead in Makhachkala. The
official version alleges that they first refused to surrender and
then shot at each other “in
despair” (RIA Dagestan, 28.6.2008).
According to the Republican Minister of Interior A.
Magomedtagirov, all of them were
members of the extremist movement “Hizb-ut-Tahrir”.
According to the information provided by Kavkazsky Uzel, at the very
start of the operation the father of R.Gazilaliev arrived to his
house, which had already been cordoned off by the police, and asked
to be given a chance to try and persuade his son to surrender, yet he
was not allowed into the cordon zone and no negotiations were ever
conducted with the besieged people (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 28.6.2008). The
population of Dagestan has expressed its just indignation at such
special operations and the capital Makhachkala has already seen a few
protest rallies. The main reproach for the operation came from the
President of the Republic himself who declared that operations of
that level of organization do nothing in the way of improving the
public image of the law enforcement services but “degrade
them”, and that “such practice must be completely
eliminated” (RIA Dagestan,
23.7.2008). It has been mentioned that
almost three months later, on September 17, at a meeting with chiefs
of the security services Mukhu Aliev again came down with harsh
criticism on those in charge of inquiries into that special operation
(RIA Dagestan, 17.9.2008);
we can therefore conclude that no progress had been made in that
respect.

Meanwhile, the republican authorities seem to be
concerned with creating a positive image of the law enforcement
services and of their struggle against terrorists. During the meeting
of the republican anti-terrorist commission on
July 23 the President of Dagestan
Mukhu Aliev specifically stressed the necessity to cover the positive
experience in combating terrorism. For all that, he declared that he
fully welcomed healthy criticism of violations in the work of the
security forces, yet he called to draw a clear distinction between
freedom of speech and “manipulating public opinion with filthy
purposes” (RIA Dagestan,
23.7.2008). This calls to mind the
infamous slogan encountered in the “Tale of the Troika”
by the Strugatsky brothers: “People
do not need unhealthy sensations. What people do need are healthy
sensations”. It is rather hard to
draw a distinction between the healthy sensations and the unhealthy
ones, when one has the job of describing the counter-terror practices
in the republic that is why, various media are regularly declared to
have fallen out of the authorities’ grace.

Summer
2008 saw the beginning of a true
hunt against the Chernovik newspaper who had repeatedly published
articles denouncing the illegal methods of countering terror in
Dagestan. One of such publications was the article entitled “No
1 Terrorists” (see:
‘Chernovik’, 4.7.2008),
where its authors directly allege that the inadequately cruel and
indiscriminate methods employed by the authorities in their backlash
in respect of not only terrorists but the republic’s religious
youth in general were the driving force behind the expansion of the
terrorist underground. In addition to that, the editors of the local
weekly demonstrated a strongly negative attitude to officers of the
Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee and
other law enforcement structures who were delegated from Moscow and
who, in the opinion of the newspaper’s editors, were ignoring
the cultural and mentality-related peculiarities of the local
population and were too straightforward and indelicate in their
actions. This article can be perceived as a certain response to the
notorious article published by another Dagestan weekly “Novoye
delo” (23.5.2008), in which one
such officer serving on a mission voiced sweeping accusations of the
human rights organization “Mother of Dagestan” as being
linked to the terrorist underground. The authors also addressed the
highly sensitive religious issues of Dagestan claiming that
traditional Sufism is increasingly losing its popularity in the
Republic (the ongoing spread of radical Islam, especially, in the
south of the Republic, in Derbent, had also been mentioned by the
President of Dagestan Mukhu Aliev as one of the key issues in his
speech – see RIA Dagestan,
23.7.2008). The appendix to the article
cited a long extract from the appeal of the Dagestani militant leader
Rappani Khalilov,
who had been killed a couple of years earlier, to the people of
Dagestan. This was the text that the Public Prosecutor of the
Republic of Dagestan Igor Ivanov deemed as containing elements of
extremist propagating. According to the information obtained by a
correspondent of Kavkazsky uzel
at the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Dagestan, a linguistic
expertise had been appointed to examine the publication of July 4 as
well as publications found in other issues of the Chernovik
newspaper for the year 2008. (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 17.8.2008).

According to the results
of the expertise, on July 31
a criminal case was opened against the editor-in-chief of the
controversial newspaper Nadira Isayeva
on suspicion of propaganda of extremism committed with the use of
mass media (Part 2 of Art.280 of the Russian Criminal Code) and
Incitement of Enmity and Hatred (Part 1 of Art.282 of the Russian
Criminal Code). On August 8
the premises of the Chenovik
weekly were searched with up to 30 officers of various security
structures of the Republic of Dagestan participating in the search.
The purposes as well as the results of that search remain unknown
(Chernovik,15.8.2008, see also:
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m143184.htm).

Meanwhile, the attempts to discredit the human
rights organisation “Mothers of Dagestan” continued. This
was again done via the republican weekly “Novoye
Delo”. The article of July 4
entitled “The evil flat”
alleged, again based on information obtained via an anonymous source
in law enforcement agencies, that Sevda
Abdullayeva, who was killed during the
special operation of the security forces in
the suburb of Separatorny of Makhachkala,
had been collaborating with “Mothers of Dagestan” and
knew one of its leaders Gyulnara
Rustamova in person. The same article
alleged that the son of one of the co-chairpersons of the
organisation Svetlana Isayeva, who went missing on April
26, 2007, was allegedly married to
a woman who had previously been in four marriages to different
guerilla militants. In reality, Isa Isayev had never been either
married or member of illegal armed formations, and was not on the
police wanted list.

The Russian human rights
community (namely, Ludmila Alekseeva, Sergey Kovalev, Oleg Orlov,
Svetlana Gannushkina, Lidia Grafova, Lev Ponomarev) responded to the
defamation campaign against the organisation with an appeal to
President Mukhu Aliev demanding from him to ensure the safety of its
members and to hold a meeting with them for discussion on
establishing regular and mutually-beneficial cooperation.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m139271.htm).
Considering that the targeted persecution of the Chernovik
newspaper began right after the publications in support of the
“Mothers of Dagestan” came out, it is possible to assume
that the appeal of the human rights activists was not heard.

Nevertheless, even the
apparent impunity and lack of control over the security service, the
pressure on the civil society and the Dagestan mass media, justice
can still sometimes be achieved at the courts of the Republic of
Dagestan. Charges based on confessions
mainly obtained under torture do not hold up to examination by
juries. Admittedly, a significant part of this is due to effective
work of attorneys and attempts to draw the attention of the wider
public to the case. Unfortunately, it is far from the rule that
defendants are able to benefit from the services of a qualified
attorney and only a share of fabricated cases result in successful
efforts of human rights activists in drawing public attention.
What is most appalling is that in not a single fabricated case, where
the fact of falsifications and torture were clearly disclosed, had
any of the civil servants involved sustained relevant punishment.

Тhus, on June 19,
2008 the jury of the Supreme Code
of the Republic of Dagestan acquitted Ilyas
Abutalibovich Dibirov, born in
1983, and he was released straight in the courtroom. His defence was
conducted by attorney Aziz Kurbanov
provided by the Memorial Human rights Centre.

Ilyas Dibirov was
abducted on November 15, 2007
in the town of Izberbash of the Republic
of Dagestan by officers of the
Republican Ministry of Interior. At the time of his arrest Ilyas
Dibirov attempted to escape, the officers opened fire, which resulted
in Dibirov being shot twice in the leg. He was taken to the temporary
detention facility of Izberbash, however, the members of his family
and the attorney hired by them knew nothing about his whereabouts for
a few subsequent days.

In the temporary
detention facilities of Izberbash and Makhachkala in which he was
kept for several weeks, he was subjected to cruel torture and
inhumane treatment. In December Svetlana
Gannushkina, member of the Expert
Council of the Ombudsman of the Russian Federation and member of the
Memorial Center of Human Rights Council,
reported this case to the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian
Federation V.P.Lukin who contacted one of the deputies of the Russian
Prosecutor General. This indeed put an end to use of torture. At
that time Dibirov was kept at the Makhachkala temporary detention
centre. In March 2008
the investigation was completed and the case was submitted for
examination to the prosecutor. Dibirov was charged with six criminal
offences pursuant to Art.208, Art.222, Art.317 (Participation in an
Illegal Armed Formation,Illegal Storage of Firearms,Encroachment
on the life of an officer of a law-enforcement agency)
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

The investigating
committee of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of
Dagestan had severed investigation into cruel treatment of Ilyas
Dibirov as a separate criminal case, although no persons possibly
involved in this crime have been identified so far
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/06/m136357.htm).

Despite his release and
rehabilitation, the misfortunes of Ilyas Dibirоv
do not seem to have come to an end. In early September
representatives of the “Mothers of Dagestan” reported
that Dibirov had been put under surveillance by unidentified
individuals who move around in cars without number plates. It should
be noted that during the investigation of the criminal case against
Ilyas Dibirov, numerous and repeated threats addressed to him and
declaring that even if he is acquitted, he would still be secretly
transferred to Chechnya where he would be executed extra-judicially,
had been registered
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/09/m146720.htm).

Inthe
middle of August the Supreme Court
of Dagestan acquitted nine defendants who were charged with
conspiring to blow up the Juma mosque in Makhachkala as well as with
planning the murder of Sheikh Said-Afandi
Chirkeysky and of the head of the
Ministry of Interior Criminal Expertise Centre Nabi
Akhadov. The leader of the criminal
gang was declared to be a Tajik migrant worker Zair Khakimov. The
other members of the gang included his co-workers from his crew and
the owners of the flat in which they were doing repair work. In
December 2007
the President of Dagestan Mukhu Aliev announced the suppression of a
dangerous Wahhabi group, while the security services of Dagestan were
honoured with the President’s praise for their efficient work.
However, in court the inquest failed to produce any details of
preparation of the crime. All the defendants were charged pursuant to
Art.208 and Art.222 of the Russian Criminal code (Participation in
Illegal Armed Formations and Illegal Storage of Firearms). It is true
that at the time of arrest some of the arrested were carrying
firearms with them, yet all of them alleged at the trial that those
had been planted by the security services. Also some of them
recognized that they had been subjected to tortures and this resulted
in their giving testimonies, which later became the basis of the
indictment. The jury considered these testimonies to be insufficient
and rendered the verdict of not guilty (Kommersant,
19.8.2008).

Yet there are also
examples of cases when the court fails to consider both the fact of
abduction of the suspect by the security services as well as the fact
that the charges are based entirely on confessionary statements
obtained under torture.

One example of this is the 3-year sentence of
German Hidirovich Hidirov who was convicted pursuant to Article 222
Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (Illegal
Acquisition and Storage of Firearms and Ammunition).
The Memorial had publications concerning the abduction of Hidirov and
the tortures to which he was subsequently subjected.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/03/m129505.htm,www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/03/m129008.htm
etc).

On
August 7, German Hidirov appealed
with a statement to the human rights organisation “Mothers of
Dagestan”. In that statement he described in detail the events
of the past months. Confessionary statements with regard to his own
involvement as well as involvement of a number of other persons in
various crimes were obtained from him by way of subjecting him to
sadistic torture including rape. In his statement Hidirov claimed
that following the inhumane treatment to which he had been subjected,
he was suffering from temporary dementia and loss of memory which
resulted in self-incrimination.

The court failed to take
into account numerous violations of the basic human rights sentencing
German Hidirov to imprisonment, despite the fact that this Part of
Art.222 provides for a fairly wide range of punitive measures not
involving imprisonment. It should be noted that Hidirov‘s case
was examined in court in the absence of jury – the norms of the
Criminal Code of the Russian Federation do not make this obligatory
in case of defendants accused pursuant to Art.222.

Radical Islam and the state counter-propaganda

The Muslim religious communities in
many republics of the North Caucasus are divided into the followers
of the ‘traditional Islam” and the recently emerging
movements considered “non-traditional” for this part of
the world. The state authorities of Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya
fully support the so-called “tariqahs” – “way,
path”, a tradition within the Sufi Islam, which has firmly
established itself here over the recent centuries and to which the
vast majority of the religious people in the republics of the North
Caucasus adhere. In the late 90s of the past century the North
Caucasus encountered a new phenomenon – preachers of a
different, fundamentalist tradition arriving from abroad and calling
upon people to return to the “original, pristine” Islam,
while rejecting a lot of aspects of the “traditionally adopted”
practice as being against the Q’uranic teaching; this includes
worshipping saints, performing Islamic rituals in exchange for
monetary reward. The adherents to this movement, which has been
officially labeled as “Wahhabi” in Russia (its members
never use the term themselves, calling themselves “salafis”
or simply “Muslims”), live under close surveillance of
the security services since it was precisely the radical Islamist
ideology that came to serve as the ideological basis for the militant
underground.

According to the news coming
from the North Caucasus, the local authorities are indeed concerned
about the recently marked trend indicating a new rising wave of
religious fundamentalism and violent rejection of the “traditional”
Islam, which is represented in the republics by institutes identified
by many with the authorities or as being closely associated with
them, and which in the eyes of many epitomize the typical vices of
those in power: corruption, self-indulgence, hypocrisy. In one of his
interviews the first President of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev described
the spiritual life of the modern youth in the following way: “You
can pick up any imam and he will read any sermon you like. The
muftiyat is crooked and rotten to the core. They [the
young people] do not believe such
preachers! They say, is that your faith?! Is that the purity in
religion you had promised us?!”
(Novaya Gazeta, 7.8.2008).

When investigating crimes and
attacks occurring in the republic, the security forces primarily work
through the lists of “non-traditional” Muslims, who are
by definition regarded as suspects. People belonging to this category
primarily become victims of unlawful actions of the security
officers, law enforcement officers, army servicemen. This only
further contributes to driving followers of the “non-traditional”
Islam into the armed underground towards their greater
radicalisation.

In reality, the signs of the
spreading influence of the religious extremists in the region are
abundant. In Dagestan and Ingushetia a number of attacks on, and
murders, of fortune-tellers and sorceresses (the latest was committed
on August
14 in
Nazran), attacks on shops selling alcohol (a message containing
threats addressed to the owner was found near the shop which was set
on fire on August
2 in
Nazran) have been registered. Summer
2008 saw
the outbreak of a true hunt after the official Muslim clerics in
Ingushetia. Rumours were circulating concerning the arrival of
prominent Islamic preachers to the North Caucasus calling upon the
youth to join the ranks of Doku
Umarov’s
militants.
One
example of such proselytism is the sermons of a certain Said
Buryatsky (son of a Russian father and a Buryat mother), an ardent
neophyte who has nevertheless already gained sufficient authority in
the Islamic theological circles. His sermons were disseminated by
means of mobile phones.

In the summer, the two
presidents – Mukhu
Aliev and
Ramzan
Kadyrov –
who held their special meetings with representatives of the security
forces and executive authorities in charge of controlling the
official information policy on July
23 and 24 respectively,
delivered lengthy declarations on counteracting the radical Islamist
movements. Both presidents stressed that the official state
propaganda channels were apparently losing in their information
battle against the militant underground. In Dagestan all the
propaganda and educational work has long been reduced to pure
formalities. According to M.Aliev’s estimates, this work had
apparently reached a deadlock, since the methods employed were purely
formalistic and only applied on an irregular basis. The effectiveness
of such work is low, while the younger generation is seeking and
craving for real, living knowledge, claimed the President of Dagestan
in his appeal to the civil servants (RIA
Dagestan, 23.7.2008). On
the same day a seminar-type meeting was held with the
editors-in-chief of the local newspapers and the directors of the
municipal television studios entitled “The role of municipal
media in ideological counteraction of extremism”. It was
pointed out that, unlike the all-republican level newspapers and
television, the district and local media are yet relatively little
involved in the ideological struggle against extremism (RIA
Dagestan, 23.7.2008).

The names of events organized and of topics of discussions held there
speak for themselves: the Dagestani authorities and civil servants
have immersed themselves mind and soul into the world of meaningless
officialese proclamations. It remains unclear how they are hoping to
break the wall of mistrust on the part of the religious youth using
methods like these.

Ramzan Kadyrov was probably
more decisive and inventive in his methods of counteracting religious
extremism. The active and massive “anti-Wahhabi”
propaganda has long become part and parcel of the republic’s
life with all possible means of influencing the thinking of the
masses being generously employed to serve this purpose. The
republican authorities often appear to be rather innovative here
seeking to fill in every spare moment in the life of Chechen people
with assertive propaganda of traditional Islam and the traditional
values of the Vainakh culture. Over the recent months alone the TV
companies in Chechnya have produced 55 promos advertising the desired
ideology. Monitors broadcasting desirable programmes have been
installed in public transport. Journalists, historians, religious
leaders are actively involved in intensive lecturing (website
‘Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov, 11.8.2008).
The religious board of Muslim believers of the Chechen Republic has
long adopted the practice of sending out unified theses for Friday
sermons to the imams of all the republican mosques.

Chairing a meeting with the
heads of district administrations, superintendents of district police
departments, representatives of the clergy in the town
of Gudermes
on July
24,
Kadyrov demanded that they intensify their work in educating the
republican youth and take concrete measures in counteracting
terrorism and extremism. He, just as the President of Dagestan before
him, spoke of outrageous negligence in the work of the heads of
district administrations and superintendents of police departments,
who, in his view, had no control over the situation at the grass-root
level, nor were they sufficiently well informed about it. Kadyrov
directly and openly charged the Islamic clergy with responsibilities
in outreach and propaganda, declaring that currently “this
type of work is not being done the way it should be. I especially
have a lot to say to the muftiyat (the association of religious
communities) and the district qadis, who have been lax in performing
their responsibilities relating to youth work. Some of these qadis do
not even seem to know what kind of people regularly gather in their
mosques and what kind of talks and discussions are held at these
meetings”. (website
‘Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov’, 24.7.2008).“Someone
comes from Buryatia and is now preaching Islam to our young guys
hiding in the woods. And they are ready to listen to him but no-one
cares for what you say. Your sermons are useless and senseless. It is
nearly impossible to infer from your teachings whether you yourselves
support the Wahhabis or the tariqahs, - declared R.Kadyrov.
The Kavkazsky
uzel
website explains that the person in question is the Muslim preacher
Sheikh Said
who arrived to Chechnya from Buryatia and is now working alongside
the leader of the militants Doku Umarov – the fact which was
confirmed by the militants’ websites (IA
Kavkazsky uzel, 24.7.2008).

But, in addition to the aggressive anti-Wahhabi
and anti-extremist propaganda, which is in many respects far too
stereotyped and superficial, the republican authorities operate with
far more affordable and straightforward means of spiritual
consolidation of the population, such as promotion of positive
examples and role models among the younger generation. One of the
“peaceful” lines of propaganda, not exploiting images of
contrast of good and evil, is the promotion of sports and healthy
lifestyle. Martial arts and football are extremely popular in the
North Caucasus. In summer 2008 the wrestlers of all of the North
Caucasus republics had achieved remarkable victories in Beijing
winning gold medals for their country. In Chechnya, Ingushetia,
Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria their victories had become an
occasion for public celebration.

The first three gold medals won by Russia’s
Olympic team and in different weight categories were won by athletes
from the North Caucasus: Nazir Mankiev
(Ingushetia),Islambek
Albiev (Chechnya), Aslanbek
Khushtov (Kabardino-Balkaria). The
following gold medals were also won by the Dagestani athletes Mavlet
Batirov, Shirvani Muradov and the
Chechen Buvaysar Saytiev.
And at the closing of the Olympic Games a gold medal was won by the
Ingushetian boxer Rakhim Chakhkiev.Among the gold medal winners of the
last Olympic Games was also the North Ossetian foilswoman Aida
Shanayeva, who had won the championship as part of the Russian
national women’s team (Respublika
Ingushetia website,
25.8.2008).
Thus, the athletes from the North Caucasus republics had won 7 out of
the 23 gold medals earned by the Russian national team in single
combat and one was won in a team event.

On August 28
the Ingush Olympic winners were triumphantly greeted at the Magas
airport in the best of the Caucasus traditions of honouring winners
returning home. According to the Ingushetiya.Ru
website, thousands of people had gathered at the airport and shooting
in the air burst out when the athletes appeared on the ramp. The
champions were escorted by a convoy consisting of several hundred
cars driving in four rows along the Kavkaz route until they reached
Nazran. The shooting continued en route to the capital
(Ingushetiya.Ru, 28.8.2008).
The President of Ingushetia awarded the gold medal winners with flats
in the city of Magas and their parents were awarded new cars
(Republika Ingushetia website,
28.8.2008). This was probably the first
time over many months that the President of Ingushetia and his people
were rejoicing over the same event (though no information is
available as to whether they were doing this together)4.

Fathers held answerable for their sons

The
urgency with which the issue of armed resistance has marked itself
over the recent years, again and again compels the authorities in the
republics of the North Caucasus resort to pacifist rhetoric and
suddenly remember about the necessity to give the last chance to
those who have gone astray. Time and again they organize rather
successful self-promotional events seeking to demonstrate not only
their generosity and readiness to forgive old sins but also their
cordiality and joy at seeing former opponents return to peaceful,
law-abiding life. The ex-health minister in Aslan Maskhadov’s
government Umar
Khambiev
was welcomed in a pompous ceremony upon his return from abroad.
Ramzan Kadyrov himself came out to meet him at the airport (Vremya
novostey, 15.8.2008).
The President of Chechnya apparently meant it as a demonstrative hint
for all others “who have not laid down arms” yet: we are
waiting for you to come, we need you and we do care…

Another
instrument of bringing pressure upon people who have joined the
underground militant groups hiding in the mountains, which deserves
special examination, is work with the family members of such persons,
who often continue in some way or other to maintain contact with
their militant relatives. This makes it possible to exploit the moral
authority of the parents or older relatives in order to persuade
their sons to return. The local authorities must play a central role
in this approach.

“Undoubtedly, a great
amount of responsibility lies with the municipal authorities,
said the President of the Republic of Dagestan Mukhu
Aliev at the meeting of the republican
anti-terrorist commission held on July
23, – today we have discussed
in detail what exactly they have to do in this respect. I hope that
all of them without exception will be prepared to confront this
problem and engage into active work with each and everyone who has
gone astray, with their family members, relatives and friends”
(RIA Dagestan, 23.7.2008).
Extending a helping hand to those who are currently hiding in the
woods was also one of the key points in the appeal of the Minister of
Interior of Dagestan (RIA Dagestan,
30.6.2008). Yet in Dagestan this line
work has so far been reduced to the scope of a pure formality and
rather ineffective.

In Chechnya the issue of using relatives as a tool
for influencing the militants was, on the contrary, tackled in the
most radical manner. Over the period of active disarmament of the
militants in 2004 – 2006, the Chechen
authorities fully exploited their families as a means of pressurizing
the armed underground. The security services stopped at nothing,
going as far as taking hostages from among the relatives of militants
in order to impel the latter to surrender (See:
www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2005/03/m33235.htm).
In the summer 2008 the practice of harsh pressure on family members
and relatives, which was nothing more but a grave violation of the
law, was resumed. Thus, in early August the authorities of the third
biggest city in Chechnya – Argun
– issued an official decree on eviction (!) of the families,
who had militants among their members, from the city. This was orally
announced to these families who were summoned especially for that
purpose to the city administration hall by the city mayor Ibragim
Temirbayev. The family members of the
“enemies of the people” were vainly trying to explain to
Temirbayev that they cannot possibly be held responsible for the
actions of their sons and brothers who had made their own independent
decision to take up the arms and join the ranks of the militants,
that they know nothing of their whereabouts and maintain no contact
with them. Those arguments were not accepted. Unable to believe that
they may really be forcefully evicted from their houses, many
families continued to live there until on August
4 when armed men came to their
homes and, failing to produce relevant documents (what documents can
be produced with regard to authorization of evictions on the basis of
family ties with militants!?), demanded that the people move out
immediately. Two families succumbed to pressure and left. Only on
August 6, apparently acting on the orders received from above,
Temirbayev again spoke before the family members of militants, no
longer threatening them with eviction, but trying to persuade them to
do all that is within their power to make their young men return from
the woods. (see:
www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m144307.htm).

On July 4,
in the village of Samashki, officers
of unidentified security services set fire to the house of the
Musikhanov family.

On July 12, a
group of armed men in camouflage outfits and masks broke into the
house of Sherpudin Demelkhanov,
in the village of Geldagan,
Kurchaloyevsky district. All the
members of the household were thrown out into the yard. Sherpudin
himself and his son were beaten and
after that the house was set on fire. The house had burnt down
completely, together with all the possessions and the money kept in
there which were borrowed from the relatives to cover the costs
related to defence in their son’s criminal case.

On the same night of July 12
an attempt was made to burn down the house of the 51-year-old Sheikha
Yusupov, in the village of Kurchaloi,
Sovetskaya street, 9, yet the
neighbours were able to put out the fire.

On July 13,
the house of Ibragim Magomadov in
the village of Khidi-khutor was
burnt down by arsonists who had also set fire to the tractor
belonging to the Magomadov family.

On July 16
armed men in camouflage outfits and masks broke into the house of
Ilyas Umarov in
the village of Nikikhita,
forcing all the inhabitants out and setting the house on fire, thus,
leaving the family with no shelter or means of subsistence. The house
of his cousin Akhmed Umarov
was also burnt down in the same way.

On July 17
came the turn of the Abdulkhanov
family with their house in the village of Aslanbek-Sheripovo
of the Shatoi district. On the same day
the house of the elderly Yusupov couple
was set on fire in the village of Gikalo
of the Grozny district. The neighbours
were awaken and helped to put out the fire, yet the beds, carpets,
curtains and some of their clothes had burnt; the furniture was also
seriously damaged. The security services believe that the sons of
Hamid Yusupov, Magomed and Ramzan, had “gone into the
mountains”.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m146741.htm).

On the night
from July 21 to 22 the house of Ramzan
Abdrakhmanov in the village of
Tsentoroi of the Kurchaloi district was
also set on fire.

On the night
from July 29 to July 30 the houses of
Elimkhanov and
Makhmud Azizov in the village
of Alleroy in the Kurchaloi district
were set on fire.

On the night
from August 27 to August 28 five
households were burnt down in the town of Shali. Three of them
belonged to the Ebishev, Yusuplhadzhiev,
Musliev families.The owners of the other two households
burnt down in Shali on the same night have not to date been
identified. On the same night the
house of the Aliev family was
burnt down in the village ofMesker-yurt
of the Shali district, Islamskaya st, 8.
The wife of Hamid Aliev, their four sons, the youngest of which was
only three, had not been told to leave the house before it was set on
fire. Aliev managed to rescue them from the burning house himself.
The neighbours witnessed the event.

The staff of the
Memorial learnt the details of the arsons of the Muslievs’
and Alievs’ households. The
arsonists declared that the Musliev family were being punished
because of Abubakar Musliev,
who had gone missing earlier, on August 8. Following his
disappearance, on August 13,
his family submitted a statement to the Prosecutor’s office.
Yet, instead of assistance in the search, the police speculated that
Abubakar had decided to join the illegal armed groups and demanded
from his father Yunus to find his son hiding in the mountains and
force him to return home. Since that day he would be almost daily
summoned to the police department and the administration and
threatened with expulsion of his family from the community
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m146310.htm).
In the case with the Alievs, the family was not even forewarned of
the arson being planned. In the middle of the night the house was
approached by two cars out of which about 10 people came running.
They broke into the yard and, having thrown several bottles with
petrol inside the house, set it on fire. Immediately after that they
left. Khasanbek dashed into the house where his wife and four sons,
the youngest of which was only 3 years old, were sleeping. He only
managed to pull them out of the house through the window - the door
and the adjacent space were wrapped in flames. Almost immediately the
neighbours came running: the house and the people were saved, yet the
property was seriously damaged. Khasanbek needed no explanations to
understand that he was being punished for his oldest son who had
joined the militant groups last May. Since that time, he and his two
oldest sons had been repeatedly summoned to the police, sometimes
police officers would come in the middle of the night demanding that
he tells them where his son is hiding.After the arson Khasanbek
Aliev lodged a complaint to the police, yet the law enforcement
services have to date showed no reaction to the committed
crime(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/08/m146742.htm).
The HRC Memorial has been providing
help to the Musliev and Aliev families in writing the complaints and
submissions to the Prosecutor’s office.

Efficiency of negotiations between the militants
and their families appears to be rather hard to assess in those cases
where such take place since such negotiations are quite
understandably not conducted in the open. It is also quite clear that
it is simply not enough for young people to be ready to quit their
activities – nobody is going to allow them to come back from
hiding in the woods all that easily. The families who agree to
conduct negotiations with the militants find themselves in a dilemma
– on the one hand, they are constantly experiencing the
pressure on the part of law enforcement agencies, on the other, they
are constantly in danger of revenge from the militants. One example
of such tragic situation was the notorious slaughter in the vicinity
of the village of Roshni-Chu of the
Shatoi district, where two locals –
Ismail Makhmudovich Tazurkayev,
born in 1969, resident of the settlement
of Novye Aldy of Grozny,
and Zaidat Abdurakhmanovna Khusenova,
resident of the village of Proletarskoye
of the Grozny (rural) district, accompanied
by two officers of the department of interior of the Shatoi district:
the superintendent of the criminal investigation department of the
Shatoi district department of interior, police lieutenant Islam
Abdulov and the police senior
lieutenant Akhdan Arsanukayev,came to meet their two nephews Salman
Umarovich Musikhanov, born in 1982,
and Mikail Umarovich Musikhanov,
born in 1986, who were members of an illegal armed group and six
other militants who had promised to surrender. Zaidat Khusenova was
informed about their intentions by phone. However, the four mediators
were killed in the wood and several days later unidentified armed men
kidnapped the younger brother in the Musikhanovs’ family,
Israpil, whose whereabouts currently remain unknown.
(www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2008/07/m138199.htm).

New
ECHR judgments in cases from Chechnya

On
July 3,the
European Court of Human Rights delivered judgments in yet another
three cases from Russia. The applicants in the case of Musayeva
v Russia and Umarov
v Russia were represented by the
staff lawyers of the Memorial Human Rights Centre (Moscow) under the
auspices of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (London). The
applicant in the case of Akhiyadova v
Russia was represented by the staff
lawyers of Stitching Russian Justice Initiative (Moscow).

In all the three cases
the European Court of Human Rights found Russia guilty of violations
of the following articles of the Convention: Article 2 (right to
life) in respect of the abducted; Article 3 (prohibition of torture
and inhumane or degrading treatment) in connection with cruel
treatment by federal servicemen and the failure of the Russian
authorities to conduct an adequate and effective investigation which
resulted in causing the applicant suffering; Article 5 (the
right to liberty and security of person) in
connection with the abduction of 4 residents of Chechnya; Article 13
(the right to effective legal remedies) in connection with the
failure of the Russian Federation authorities to provide their
citizens with effective means of legal protection. In respect of the
repeated refusal of the State to provide the Court with the criminal
investigation materials a violation of Article 38 § 1 of the
Convention (obligation of the State to furnish all necessary
facilities for effective examination of the case matter by the Court)
has been found.

During the “mopping-up
operation” in the Oktyabrsky
district of Grozny on February 5, 2000,
which the local residents had been warned of in advance, military
personnel wearing camouflage outfits had taken Yakub
Iznaurov, born in 1966, father of five
and the youngest son of the applicant, Khapta
Musayeva, away for “a checkup”.
The reason for detention was the fact that Yakub Iznaurov’s
official domicile was in the Republic of Kalmykia.

Near the tram line the
serviceman who had decals of sub-colonel on his uniform ordered Yakub
and the other three men taken to stand on their knees and raise their
hands having previously stripped themselves off down to the waist.
The servicemen tied the hands of the detained men with a metal wire
and pulled their hats on their faces. All this was being recorded by
the servicemen on a camera.

The detained were kept in this position for about
2 hours during which they were not allowed to move. After
that, they were forced into the armoured personnel carriers. The
applicant and the relatives of the other detained persons were told
that the latter would be taken to Staraya Sunzha for interrogation.
The men in camouflage also said that they were officers of the St
Petersburg OMON (special purpose police forces). The armoured
personnel carriers started off in the direction of Novye
Aldy.

The applicant and the
relatives of the other persons detained began to search for them.
They visited temporary detention facilities, talked to military
personnel, appealed to various authorities, yet all this brought no
result – Yakub Iznaurov did not appear on any of detainee
lists. His fate currently remains unknown.

According to the data collected by the Memorial,
on February 5, 2000 at least 60 civilians were killed in the villages
of Novye Aldy and Chernorechye south of Grozny (see
the report “Novye
Aldy settlement - February 5, 2000. Intentional Killings of
Civilians”.)

In 2002 the applicant lodged an application with
the European Court of Human Rights with the help from the staff
lawyers of the Memorial and the European Human Rights Advocacy
Centre. The court has ordered to pay to the applicant 35,000 euros in
compensation for the material damage caused, 10,000 euros in
compensation for the moral damage as well as 8,000 euros in
compensation of the legal and other court submission related fees.

Case of Ruslan
Umarov v Russia

At 6 am on May
27, 2000 a group of armed men
wearing camouflage and masks broke into the house of Ruslan
Umarov and started hurling insults at
his wife and daughter and beating the master of the house. After
that, they dragged Ruslan out into the yard where the beating
continued. Hearing the screams, Ruslan’s son, Magomed
Umarov, came out running from the
backhouse where he was sleeping and asked the armed men why they were
beating his father. Magomed was dragged into the Ural vehicle, which
drove off leaving the members of the household without explanations.
According to the neighbours’ testimonies, the car belonged to
the Staropromyslovsky Police Department of Grozny. Magomed was not
even allowed to change into something warmer, the armed men took
Magomed’s passport and his student ID card (he was a student of
the Grozny State Institute of Oil),

Three hours later Ruslan Umarov arrived at the
Grozny Public Prosecutor’s Office. He was able to identify one
of those who attacked him in the morning among the police department
officers, yet no information about his son could be obtained there.
Some time later Ruslan Umarov managed to meet with the Magomadov
brothers and a certain Butenko, who had seen Magomed being kept a
prisoner on the territory of the military base in Khan-kala. Ruslan
Umarov has repeatedly appealed to the Prosecutor’s Office, to
courts, to officials of every rank, he also attempted to achieve
result through involving unofficial channel. Yet all his attempts
resulted in nothing.

The Court has ordered to
pay to Ruslan Umarov a compensation in the amount of 15,000 euro for
the material damage, 40,000 euro for the moral damage, as well as
reimburse him for all legal fees and sue charges.

Case of Esila
Akhiyadova v Russia

On
February 13, 2002, at about 11 am,
a group of armed men wearing camouflage outfits and masks broke into
the house of the Khumaidov
family in the village of Makhkety.
According to the applicant, they were federal military officers,
while the Government’s submissions refer to them as
‘unidentified persons’.

The applicant herself, her husband, their
daughter, who was only 15 days old, and her father-in-law, Kharon
Khumaidov, born in 1932, were at home at the time. The armed men
failed to produce any identification documents or any documents
justifying their conduct. They searched the house and detained the
applicant’s husband and father-in-law without any explanations
as to the reasons. Despite the fact that Magomed and Kharon Khumaidov
were only wearing trousers and shirts, they were not allowed to
either put on something more substantial or take any clothes with
them. The armed men forced them into a military UAZ vehicle without
number plates and took them away to the FSB base in the village of
Khatuni.
According to the information that was available to the applicant, a
number of residents of Makhkety witnessed the arrest of her husband
and father-in-law.

After that both Magomed and Kharon Khumaidov
disappeared. Subsequent search for them
brought no result. Despite the fact that the Prosecutor’s
Office had established the involvement of the servicemen of the 45th
regiment in the abduction, nobody has so far been held liable as a
result of the inquest. (For more detail
see the website of ‘Stitching the Russian Justice Initiative”,
7.6.2007).